


Susan At Sea

by Chretien_S



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28768419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chretien_S/pseuds/Chretien_S
Summary: The others think that Susan has abandoned Narnia, but there is something she cannot tell them. On the way home from America, Susan found herself suddenly back in another world, hundreds of years before the time she knew, and has had to make a new role for herself.
Kudos: 12





	Susan At Sea

Susan woke gently, the lamp above her bunk swinging, a distant clamour of gulls in her ears, content and at ease with the ship’s motion. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east; she could hear the early watch up on deck setting fishing nets over the stern. No one in the cabins was stirring yet; the young princess in the bunk below had her thumb in her mouth. Her mother would have had something to say about that, but as the Queen was not aboard Susan just let it slide. She dozed off herself for a little while, but then woke once more with a start. Swanny was still fast asleep, but the men above were shouting excitedly. Some sixth sense prickled inside her, telling her to get up, get out on deck. Throwing aside the blanket she quickly twisted her long hair into a knot, pulled on a tunic and loose-fitting trousers, slipped out of her cabin and up the steep ladder. On deck the sudden sun stung her eyes like lemon juice. There had been a battering rain in the night; now in the bright morning the wet sails were taut and steaming, the ship humming through the waves. Seabirds she didn’t recognize with long trailing tail-feathers were wheeling, diving around the ship. An excited jabber came from the sailors standing around the bulging net, dripping across the port-side decks. There was something big in it alongside the smaller fish; Susan could not quite see it at first.

“Let me through,” she said to the ship’s gunner, a little brusquely, then added, “may I see?” He stepped aside at her touch on his shoulder and there Susan saw at once it was no great fish they had caught, but a dolphin. The galley-cook was standing over the helpless beast, a wicked-looking knife in his hand; he motioned Susan back.  
“Whoah there, missy,” he spat. “Best step away. This might not be too pleasant to watch.”

“Wait!” Susan cried, an unexpected command in her voice. The dolphin was struggling feebly, trying to leap but finding its own body ten times its usual weight. She knelt down by its head. There seemed a mute plea in its tiny black eye and as she bent closer, a faint clicking, whistling sound from its beak.  
“I think it’s trying to speak,” she said aloud. “Shush!”  
The sailors quietened at once, glancing around, unsettled at the idea of touching a talking beast. Susan leant closer again to the big rubbery bulk. Were these words it was speaking or not?  
“…water…” it gasped at last.  
“It is!” she cried once more. “It’s talking! Quick, get it back into the water!”

It took some moments to disentangle the exhausted dolphin from the net and lower it over the side once more into the sea and let it go. Susan felt a rush of relief, but also perhaps a small tinge of respect for once from the sailors. Many had not wanted her on the ship in the first place and certainly not on deck. Some seemed to think it unlucky to have females on board and ignored both her and the young princess. Others delighted in them, treating them both as children to pet and amuse. Still others gave Susan a different kind of look that set her teeth on edge. She was as tall as many of them. Staying below as Swanny tended to was more what they expected of a girl.

***

Back in the cabin, Swanny was stirring. Her eyes widened as Susan told her the story, and then almost at once she began to worry about her father once more.

“Can I go and sit with the King?” she asked. “Of course,” Susan replied, and took her to the sick bay. She was ushered in at once to the darkened cabin. There were hushed voices, fervent prayers; the smell of incense and stale sweat. Susan stayed outside. Nothing I can do there, she thought, I’ve no gift for healing. One thing I can do though, she mused, leaning back against her bunk a few moments later, is handle a boat. At least the trip to America hadn’t been wasted entirely. New York and San Francisco were all very well but the best part for her had been those two weeks they’d had in Boston, messing around in yachts at the sailing pavilion. Her parents assumed it was the young men who competed to take her out to Deer Island that she was interested in, and the dances in the evening. But they had soon begun to bore her; it was the clear fresh air that had made her feel alive, an inch or two taller at least.

Susan went back up on deck. The sea was a deep jewel-like blue; a stiff wind whipping up white-horses from the wave-tops. Before he was taken ill the captain had invited her to be his guest up on the quarterdeck with the helmsman; perhaps he thought she would not get in the sailors’ way up there. Judging the wind and the balance of the boat were things Susan was used to and she had watched the sailors at work. But with the big sails straining she knew a ship this size was a different kind of beast from the little yachts in Boston harbour. They were running before a fresh north-westerly in mainsails and two jibs, the sky bright with billowing clouds, a few shreds of blue to the south. Susan watched how the boatswain trimmed and fussed with the jibs to keep them even; loosening a sheet here, hauling in there.

Presently there came a cry of ‘sail!’ from the masthead lookout. She rushed up at once onto the quarterdeck. The mate was already at the after-rail with a telescope; he put it away and turned as Susan stepped up to him.

“What is she?” she asked simply.  
“Corsair,” the mate growled, “from Calormen.”  
“What course?”  
“Same as us,” he replied. “Matchin’ us. In this wind she’ll be faster’n us, if anything.”  
“A trader?” Susan was thinking fast.  
“Nowhere to trade to out here.” The implication was obvious.

“Can we put on more sail?” Susan asked. The mate paled. With both King and Captain still ill below decks all responsibility devolved to him, and it was clear he didn’t like it. He looked around; there was only him, the helmsman and this girl on the quarterdeck. He gripped the rail with both hands and bellowed to the men below.  
“Top foresails! Sharp about it!” Hands sprang into action, pulling the extra sails up from the forward lockers, scrambling up the shrouds to set them. Then the mate put the telescope to his eye and gazed astern once more.

“Closin’ on us,” he muttered. He turned again to Susan. “Beggin’ your pardon missy, but you should probably be down in your cabin. If this should come to a fight…”  
“Her Highness is below with the King. I’ll stay up here.” The mate ground his yellow teeth, but did not try to argue, and Susan stood her ground, trying to act more confidently than she felt. She could not help but think of Swanny below decks with her father. She was far too young to have been brought on a voyage like this. What would happen to her if the ship were taken? The Calormen corsair was in view to the naked eye now, gaining fast. As the Paravelle’s new topsails dropped and with a bang filled with wind she heeled to starboard and picked up speed, but not enough to pull away from the swift corsair, a little lower in the water.

All through the morning and into the afternoon they kept their places, the distance between steadily narrowing. The Paravelle set a spritsail too but after that there was no more canvas to use, and the wind was freshening, veering north so that they were now both on a full reach; the Lone Islands must have been long behind them, but they could not have risked putting in to a potentially hostile port, she could well see that. By mid-afternoon the corsair was close enough that Susan could see the faces of the Calormen crew through the telescope; they were hauling up slim black cannon to the fore deck. Before long there came a low popping sound and a splash as the shot hit the sea nearby and then another cry from the masthead.  
“She’s raising a flag!” There was a pause. “No… no quarter.”

Susan’s heart missed a beat. She could see the plain black square for herself. Why had the King insisted on travelling with such secrecy and without even a proper guard?  
The gunner clambered up onto the quarterdeck.

“Sir…?” he asked uncertainly.  
“What is it?” snapped the mate.  
“Should we move the cannon aft?” he asked. “Return fire?”  
The mate did not reply for a moment. Susan thought fast.  
“What’ll be your accuracy,” she asked quickly, “in this swell?” Both ships were rolling heavily.  
The gunner winced. “Not much. If we could only…” he floundered.  
“Then shouldn’t we save our powder?” Susan snapped back. “All cannon to port. Our best hope is a broadside at close range. We’re bigger than they are.”

The gunner nodded, looking from one to the other of them. The mate looked stunned for a moment, and then sprung once more into action.  
“Cannon to port,” he ordered, but then called to two more men down on deck, “Ready the cutter! Starboard side!”  
The men on deck looked at one another, puzzled. Surely the mate could not be planning to abandon ship? Even Susan could see there was not room in the cutter for even a third of the crew – and they were miles from land.

“Helm steady!” the mate barked, and then darting down the ladder, called out more orders to the men below. In a moment the galley-cook and his boy were up on deck with barrels of food and water, preparing to load them into the cutter. The moment they came out into the open air they saw the corsair’s sails, now looming just a couple of hundred yards astern on the port quarter, and they blanched with fear. The other hands turned to look in confusion.

“What you gawpin’ at?” screamed the mate. “You! Below, to the guns. You, ready the pumps. You, help stow the cutter…”  
But the men were all in open confusion now, close to defiance. They could hardly believe what they were seeing.  
“Should we bring up the passengers, sir?” one man asked. The mate just stared at him and then turned away. Right then there came another much louder ‘pop’ from the port quarter and with a screeching sound a cannonball tore a great rent in the mainsail. Now Susan leapt to the rail.

“Wear away!” she called to the helmsman. Then to the men below, “Pay out the starboard sheets! Ready ship, to quarters!” The men leapt into action. As the ship turned stem-to-wind she presented a much smaller target to the corsair, still close astern and racing through the waves. The wind was still rising, Susan felt a fresh sting of cold spray on her cheeks.

“Ready the port sheets! Bring her about!” With a huge creaking sound the Paravelle heeled over to port and the corsair shot past her stern, loosing off another volley uselessly into the air. The Paravelle’s mate lost his footing ignominiously, sprawling over the deck just as she took a wave amidships. The wind was getting up fiercely now, Susan realized with a sick feeling in her stomach and as they pulled up into it another big wave crashed into the bows, drenching the fore deck. Her knuckles were white on the rail.

“Leave the cutter!” she tried to call down to the cook and his boy, but her voice faltered and nothing came out. Come on, she told herself. You have held a throne, you are a Queen. High Queen, even if none of these people would ever know it. “Leave the cutter!” her voice rang out, a second time. They were staring up at her open-mouthed, but obeyed. Then the mate scrabbled back up onto the quarterdeck. His furious face combined with his dripping jacket would have made him look ridiculous in any other situation. Now he looked frankly terrifying.

“Jus’ what d’you think you’re doin’, missy?” he bellowed. “We can’t outrun her. We’re just goin’ to…”  
“Starboard a point, Mister Helmsman,” Susan called, as coolly as she could manage. And then, “Starboard sheets!” she shouted over the noise of the waves. Finally she turned back to the mate. “No, we can’t outrun her. Look!”

The Paravelle had come round full circle and was now at the corsair’s stern. The lettering, picked out in black on a canary-yellow transom, declared that the pirate ship was named the Asp. The Asp had loosened sails and lost way as the Paravelle manoueuvred; now she swung to starboard herself to pick up the wind. The two vessels were almost close enough to throw a line. Susan could see the Calormen sailors frantically hauling the cannon onto their after decks, trying to get them lined up and lashed to fire once more.

Belatedly, the King’s two guardsmen stumbled up onto the Paravelle’s deck, buckling on their shining ceremonial breastplates.

“But our cannon are on the wrong side!” the mate cried. “We’ll have to…”  
This time Susan just ignored him. “Ready sheets both sides!” she called.  
“We’re goin’ to ram her stern!” the mate shouted, his face white with terror.  
“Helm starboard – port sheets,” yelled Susan, “Gunner! Ready fire!”

The bigger ship heeled to port now as a gust filled her sails, almost brushing the Asp’s stern. For a moment the Asp wallowed, the wind lost from her sails, and the Paravelle slipped past her stern.   
The Calormen guns were almost in place. The Paravelle’s gunner looked up expectantly at the quarterdeck.

“Hold,” Susan called to him. “Port two points,” she told the helm and as the ship righted herself, now beam-on to the Asp’s starboard quarter she finally called out “Fire!”  
The volley, eight cannon at once, was almost deafening. The corsair’s poop deck crumpled like a house of cards, the glass windows shattering in a cloud of gleaming dust.

“Reload!” Susan called, but the men were already scurrying to do so.  
“Alongside!” she called to the helmsman.  
“Ready!” the gunner’s cry came up from the deck.

“F - - - “ this time the word died in Susan’s throat. The Calormen sailors were all on their knees on the deck, their hands in the air. Her mizzen-mast was splintered and hanging uselessly over the windward side, the stern quarter of the ship a gaping hole where the poop deck had once stood.

“Hold your fire!” Susan called instead, and turning to the Asp, “Do you surrender?” No one answered, but she saw the looks on the men’s faces turn from despair to fury at the sound of her voice. Swiftly, the Narnian sailors and the King’s two guardsmen put over grappling hooks, loosened sail and brought the two ships together; struggling to hold the ropes as the ships bucked in the choppy sea. Eventually they boarded. There seemed to be no captain aboard the Asp, perhaps blown overboard by that one close broadside. They gathered the Calormen sailors in a huddle in the foc’sle and searched the ship.

She was lightly stored, which would help to account for her speed. The Narnians found a group of eight miserable-looking slaves below deck and took them aboard the Paravelle, with provisions and water enough to keep them. They took all the powder too, cutlasses and shot, and leaving the Calormens a few sacks of meal and three barrels of water, finally set the near-crippled ship free.

The sun was beginning to set now, a deep red stain showing through black banks of cloud in the western sky. The wind was dropping a little at last, and a pair of dolphins broke the surface near by. Susan suddenly realized how cold she was. “Where’s the cook?” she called down to the boatswain. “Have him hand out a ration of rum. All hands.”

“Beg pardon if I may, miss,” the gunner ruminated as they watched the Asp drift off, her crew scurrying to clear the broken spars and rigging from her littered decks, “but another skipper would have just slaughtered the lot of them. They’d flown the black flag. Reckon you’re a bit more tender-hearted than some, then.”

Susan smiled at him. “It’s true,” she replied, “I’ve no stomach for that.” The Paravelle was pulling around to the south-west once more, to resume her passage to the Lone Islands.  
The gunner looked at the slight yet commanding figure beside him, slowly. “You had stomach enough for the fight, though. That was a smart bit of action. Will you be captaining the Paravelle now – at least till the skipper’s well-enough to come back up on deck?”

Susan stared at him in confusion, and looked around for the ship’s mate. He was nowhere to be seen on board. Nor was the cutter.

***

Susan made sure that everything was ship-shape once again in the gathering darkness, set lamps on the cross-trees, entrusted the helm to the boatswain and sent the exhausted helmsman below to his hammock. Then, suddenly weary herself beyond imagining, she stepped below to her cabin, and shut the door behind her. Swanny was there in the bottom bunk already, her tangled blonde hair falling across her chubby sleeping face. Who had fed the child today, Susan wondered? Had she put herself to bed? Susan sighed and leant back, breathing out one long slow breath. And then the hairs stood up suddenly on the back of her neck: it was not a hard wooden door she was leaning against, but something warm, living and equally solid – a deep rich scent and a brush of silky fur.

“Is it… you?” she gasped.

There was no answer, but she did not need one.

“Did I… I never… was that…” she was not speaking coherently now, she knew.

“You did well, child,” the deep familiar voice came at last, “you saved many lives. One of those slaves that you freed from the pirate ship; it is he who will go on with the King to the Lone Islands; it is he who will defeat the dragon, and unite the islands to the Kingdom of Narnia for all time.”  
“Will he? I wonder which one? I did not find it easy to imagine King Gale doing that himself…” Susan smiled wryly.  
“No?” The Lion’s reply came very slowly.  
“He’s so pompous and self-important…” Susan broke off, at the faintest suggestion of a growl. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to criticize.”  
“It is not for you to decide who will or will not make a hero. And if King Gale is not that himself then he has a daughter who wishes to think that he is, that she may be one herself in turn.”  
“Her? Little Swanny?” Susan could not help but laugh.

The Lion’s reply was slow again. “To you the royal princess seems a sweet, foolish, prattlesome child. Exactly what you hope not to be yourself. But one day she will be a great Queen, and even you, as High Queen hundreds of years later, will listen to tales about her.”  
Susan gasped as realization dawned. “Then she – she – is to be Queen Swanwhite from the legends?”  
There was no reply. “And I…” – Susan faltered. “I have to return now, don’t I?”  
“You do, my child. I have brought you to another time in Narnia, long before the one that you will make your own and that everyone will know, and I may not keep you here for long. The King has had a fever, he will know nothing about this or about your part here. The sailors will tell tales but then sailors always do, and so few will believe them. And for yourself, you may not even…”  
“No!”  
“You may not even tell your brothers and sister the story. I know what you are thinking. This will put a wall between the four of you for a long time. You are right. But you will meet them in the Uplands one day, and then all will be known at last.”

“Please, I don’t want to go back just yet. I want to talk to Swanny again and kiss her goodbye.” She pressed herself back against the Lion’s thick soft fur, feeling it on her neck and cheek. Somehow she did not dare to turn around and stare him full in the face. “And I was just about to be dragged to another horrid party on that liner, and introduced to yet another dreadful gawking boy…”  
“…when I showed you a cabin door marked ‘Do Not Enter’ and like the true Narnian only you and I know you are, you entered. Fear not, brave Susan. I will return you to your own cabin, two hours later. Everyone will assume you had a headache, or felt seasick.”  
“But I never…!” Susan was indignant.  
“Of course not,” the Lion replied. “I know what you are made of, and now perhaps you do too. Many others never will. And tomorrow – well, tomorrow you will dock at Liverpool, and there another story may begin.”

***  
Berwick-upon-Tweed, 2020


End file.
